


He Called Me Darling

by HollowPhoenix



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Gore, Brief Mention of Suicide, Broken Bones, But only a little, Canonical Character Death, I dont know how to tag things, M/M, Original Character(s), POV Third Person, Survival Horror, Tags May Change, dead bodies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2020-04-07 03:32:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19076617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HollowPhoenix/pseuds/HollowPhoenix
Summary: He'd made a pact, years ago, with one Eddie Gluskin. In the event of a riot, they'd escape together, consequences not included. But dream therapy was strong, and tasted like blood. How much are his promises worth, anyway?





	1. Commence

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this one a while back and posted it somewhere else with a different name. It was incredibly cringey, but I always thought that the concept had substance. I know I keep writing these weird OC fanfics. But trust me my dudes. It won't be that bad.

The lights flickered and then shut off altogether, the power grid clunking and ringing across the building until the droning sound of technology stopped completely. He didn't know if it was an isolated incident, confined to cell block A only. But what he did know, was that the sound he heard was that of the automatic locks on his cell deactivating. This left him with choices, and with those choices came unfulfilled promises. So he placed a trembling hand upon the cold, metal handle and squeezed. To his unrelenting surprise, it budged. It did more than that, it _opened_. The sound of the cell door creaking made him feel two ways. It made him feel an adrenaline rush like none he'd ever felt before, but it also made his blood run cold. If he was out, so were the others. _Maybe everyone was out_ , he thought. Pushing the door wide open, he made a split decision to run. He would run and run, until he was out. But first he had to remind himself that he'd made pacts. Promises. As he sprinted down the hall with a number of other patients, he worked out the logistics of his plan. He realized quickly that it called for information he didn't know. He needed resources. He needed someone from the inside.

This was where software engineer Waylon Park fit in. He wore the potato sack jumpsuit well, but lacked the nerve of an escaped patient. He stuck out in a way that made him seem soft and blissfully ignorant to the attributes of a troubled psyche. He grasped to sanity in a place where none remained. He hadn't been the intended target. But he would do.

The rotating lights flashed emergency red, coating the corridors in more crimson than they deserved. Waylon shielded his eyes as another wave of hallucinations pierced into his brain. The Engine was strong; the static ink blots behind his eyes made him nauseous. He stumbled and held his weight against a plastic-sheeted wall. He groaned and begrudgingly waited for it to pass. He didn't notice the door to his left creak open. Had it been anyone else, he'd made an easy target.

"Hey. You. C'mere."

The voice carried from beyond the door, over the sound of the harsh alarms blaring in Waylon's ears. He pressed himself against the wall and broke into a cold sweat. He could only make out a fleshy, pink hand holding the door open. The room behind it was too dark. The nausea was gone, and was instead replaced by an almost primal response to his fear, one that said "run".

"You're not one of them. I've seen you before, behind the glass. You work at the Engine." The voice recalled. The hand holding the door stable slithered back into the darkness of the room behind it and the figure revealed itself, making Waylon tense his muscles and feel like throwing up.

He was a young man far shorter than Waylon, sporting an uneven, dirty blonde side-shave, and a set of light scars across his forehead, left cheek, and neck, likely caused by intensive sessions at the Engine. He was inmate 2798, if his uniform told truthfully. Overall, he appeared less threatening than most things Waylon had seen while putting in his hours at Massive. He lowered his guard, if only minimally.

"You know your way around the inside. I need your help."

"Wh..what?" Waylon's heart sunk. This was a one-sided arrangement, he already knew it. 

"Don't talk, just listen. I need to escape, and you need to escape. But first, I need to find someone I owe debts to. That's putting it simply. To do that, I need you. Or at least someone like you. And everyone else like you is dead. You help me find my guy, and then we go our separate ways."

Waylon hesitated to answer. His heart pounded like a drum inside his head. His throat tightened and his legs trembled.

The man changed his expression to one of impatience. "You don't have a choice." He said, sighing and straightening his posture. "If you stay that way, someone's going to out you as an employee. Get on your feet, let's get going."

Waylon did as he was told and followed the man, albeit uncertainly, down the plastic-sheeted hallways, and through a wide tear in the tarp. The walls around him crumbled and the corners were clouded with cobwebs.

"We have to go through the kitchen. All the other doors are locked."

As Waylon started for the open door into the kitchen, a hand was brought down against his shoulder and pulled him into a crouch against the door frame. He pressed a finger to his lips and gestured to Waylon to examine the room closer.

Lifting his camera and zooming in to view past the clutter in the entrance, he saw it: A man with a buzz saw, carving chunks from a corpse like a Christmas ham. Waylon's breath caught in his throat. "Why… he's.."

"That's Manera." The inmate whispered. "I only saw him out of isolation once, and even then, he had a mask over his face. Bared a striking resemblance to Hannibal Lecter, if you can believe it."

Waylon believed it just fine. Watching the man rip stringy arteries with his teeth and revel in the warm feeling of blood on his face was proof enough.

"It's dark, he can't see. Come with me." The prisoner whispered, before slipping silent and barefoot into the kitchen.

What hit Waylon first was the smell of meat gone bad. It was different from animal product; it smelled sickly sweet while still maintaining the stench of rot. He swallowed the urge to vomit. It got better for only a moment when they passed through the freezer. But the odor returned full-force when he passed by a lit stove and a large, deep pot on the burner, boiling bones and skin for a sickly rotten broth later. "Oh, my God." He mumbled, his eyes watering from fighting the urge to heave.

The inmate shushed him and turned the corner into the cafeteria. The buzz saw was shrill, working overtime to cut through bone and cartilage. It pierced both of their ears and kept the adrenaline pumping through their veins. To play prey to a predatory man made Waylon shudder with fear. He was nearly a deer in the headlights were it not for the motivation of a red exit sign hanging overhead. He navigated around and under the tables and corpses silently, at the instruction of the strange inmate he'd met moments ago. All the while, the prominent smell of human death never left his nose.

Once they rounded the corner and passed under the exit sign, he breathed a sigh of relief. Getting up off of his hands and knees should have made him feel less passive; more safe. But it didn't. Nothing could sate the desire his subconscious had developed to stay safe in fear, not until he was miles away from this place.

"Bathroom." The inmate mouthed, pointing to another open corridor, covered in plastic.

Wandering through the facility like this made Waylon quickly understand that he had no conceivable idea where he was being led. He didn't know this man or his motives. He was being stupid, and in front of the blood-clotted sinks and a rusted set of lockers, this realization came to be all he could focus on. "Hey," Waylon said, splitting the silence in the dark. He tried his best to be assertive, but it hadn't ever been his strong suit, and it was more obvious that this was the case in such a stressful situation. "where are you taking me?" He inquired. "What kind of debts do you have? I don't even know who you are."

The inmate's hand rested upon the doorknob. His head pounded and his breath was uneven. "I made a pact with someone a year ago. We agreed that if there was ever a riot, We would leave together. You're here because I don't know the inner-workings of this place. My name doesn't matter, but you can call me Ivy. It's what everyone else does."

The nickname was surprisingly… feminine. It took Waylon by surprise. He'd expected something else, though he didn't know what that was. "Ivy?"

The inmate nodded.

"Why?"

Ivy twisted the doorknob and applied some force to the door. It stuck to the floor and required a hard push before creaking open. He walked down the short hallway with Waylon and recalled the incident briefly, not enjoying the unpleasant taste the memory left in his mouth. "Someone attacked me in the showers. I bit him in the arm and it got infected. It itched and filled with pus, like poison. He had to get it amputated; he itched it until it was raw and black. So they called me the Poison Ivy. A way to make what happened seem sweeter than what it was, I guess." He cleared his throat. "Through here." He beckoned, pointing to the darkened hallway labeled 'Crematorium'.

Waylon felt hot. The crematorium was startlingly ordinary in comparison to the rest of the asylum. It seemed to be used more as a storage closet than what it was truly intended for. There was an unsettling lack of corpses present, which Waylon reminded himself would be a concerning thought to have in any other instance. Through the mesh fence dividing the area into two parts, he could see a door marked 'EXIT' in big, pulsing red letters. The feeling that ran through him was wild; desperate. He'd do anything to be on the opposite side of the fence. Noticing that the lock on the gate was weakened, Waylon asked Ivy if there was anything he could do about it.

Picking up a metal drain pipe that lied about carelessly, Ivy weighed it in his hands and judged its force. Nodding to himself, he took it in his hands like a baseball bat. He directed Waylon to move out of the pipe's reach and swung it hard to connect with the faulty padlock. Metal cracked against metal and the pipe vibrated in Ivy's hands, causing him to lose his grip on it and drop it to the ground. He clenched his fingers and flexed his hands. It hurt, but only for a moment. He looked back up at the lock to examine his progress and found that it had fractured enough to remove it from the chain that held the gate in place. He hadn't expected that. The dream therapy must be working.

Waylon made an unsettled noise. He'd not expected it, either.

The chain slipped out of the holes in the mesh fence and the gate opened with a squeak and clank. Waylon tasted his freedom on the base of his tongue, but didn't anticipate what he was met with upon walking through the gate and into the room directly across from it. The door was locked, and boarded with two sturdy wooden planks. His exit sign had been unluckily misleading, instead guiding him into a mock-up of a church. Singular chairs stood in for pews, and the podium was adorned by a set of curtains and a large, wooden cross hanging on the wall. If Waylon was honest with himself, he knew it wouldn't have been so simple. His mind filled with uncertainty again. What was he to do now?

"It's funny." Ivy spoke up. "They still believed God would come. Not knowing this place was built at the threshold of Hell." He sat in one of the imitation pews and draped his arm over the top of the chair. "God wouldn't set foot in here, afraid he'd spoil himself and his followers."

Waylon blinked. It seemed true enough. He'd seen things tonight that earned him a one-way ticket into the fiery gates, free of charge. "What did _you_ do?" He asked. It made his skin crawl, not wanting the answer. "What're _you_ in for?"

"You didn't see the file?"

He shook his head. "I'm not allowed."

Ivy took air into his lungs and breathed a heavy sigh. "It wasn't even my fault." He muttered. "I saw something. Overheard a man talking on his phone about MKULTRA, unethical treatment. He needed the medicine. Something about the medicine. I was walking home, for God's sake, what was I supposed to do? He said too much, didn't see me behind him. He was too busy begging to keep his job. He said he needed it for the medicine. I don’t know." He narrowed his eyes and creased his brow. "It was a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. His cell was probably throwaway, hell if I know, I have no clue how any of this works. He said "Murkoff", he said "asylum", and then I…" He pursed his lips out of frustration. "I walked past him as fast as I could like a fucking idiot. The next morning I was being followed from the store all the way back to that same dirt road. They had me committed and gave my mother millions to keep her quiet. That's what they told me, anyway. They threw me into the Engine and liked how well I received it… and it wasn't even my fault." His eyes were wet and red. His fingers grasped the back of the chair with white knuckles. "My file says "Psychopathologist Proximity Stress Disorder". It's essentially the easy bullshit way to kidnap someone and say it was for their own good."

Waylon heaved a sigh. He'd misjudged the boy too much at first glance. It had been warranted judgment, surely. But Waylon felt heavy watching him grasp the wooden chair and beg his tears to comply with his hardened exterior. His story hit far too close to home. Murkoff had a way of covering their tracks seamlessly, and twisting the legal system to work in their favor. The cross hung overhead, and it felt like blatant mockery. He needed to get out of this place, the sooner the better. "What about your pact?" Waylon asked. "Isn't someone waiting for you?"

Ivy raised his head and pulled his fingers through his hair. Standing on his feet, he started towards the door. "Yes. I promised."


	2. Radio

The harsh scent of blood was familiar to his nose, and even in the humid night air, it still wouldn't go. The odor was ever present, lingering and seeping into his skin through the damp air. A blanket of fog hung overhead, veiling his eyes and stopping up his lungs. He wondered if he was inside the Engine again; if the riot had been only a suggestion implanted into his mind by dream therapy, and he was stuck like a pig inside Murkoff's test tubes. He wondered off and on if Waylon was real. If any of this was. The only thing tugging him back to reality was the subtle things; things he didn't think could be emulated. The relief brought on by the kiss of the wind, the way it offset the metallic smell that lingered so heavy over this place, it made him feel real.

He didn't recognize the Rec area as it was now. It laid in shambles; a mess of blood and innards. Gates were ripped from their hinges and holes pried into mesh fences. Waylon spoke to him of a functioning radio in the prison, but his own mind was elsewhere. The disregard he had for his own life was based solely upon his care for another. His ears were deaf to Waylon. He heard only the breeze and the unsettling cacophony  of screeches and bangs that mingled in the air.

"…might be able to call someone. Hey."

"Huh?"

Waylon dropped his shoulders a bit. "Are you listening?"

"I- No." Ivy replied flatly. His wants went past the radio, but Waylon had purpose. The inner-workings of the asylum were a foreign place. Much to his dismay, if his hostage insisted on it, he was headed upward, into a radio tower. "I'm, uh.. sorry. I can't think straight." He added, his eyes wild but glossy, remembering the time he'd spent in the Rec yard.

Waylon sucked in a breath. He shuddered as he studied Ivy's bitten fingers, clenching and un-clenching rhythmically with the rise and fall of his chest. He watched the man's bloodshot eyes dart from one end of a blood-soaked picnic table to the other. He seemed familiar, like the rest. Under the exterior, Waylon could tell the Engine had done its number on him, too. No matter the extent he hid it, Ivy was like them, though he hadn't started out that way. Waylon was playing a game with death and he knew it, but he stuck his neck out into the road anyway. "You said you were looking for something?" He said it, almost teasing the answer. He didn't know why; maybe the Engine was to blame here, too.

"Not something, some _one_." Ivy corrected.

"I didn't think a man could make friends in here."

Ivy didn't have a reply. "It doesn't matter, I promised him."

They continued through the courtyard, dodging an occasional inmate and ignoring constant desperate cries for aid, shouting about _it's in my skin, everywhere, under my eyelids, get it out!_ It had become a mantra at this stage, an ever-present ambience that penetrated the brain, though it was unaware of the molestation. The only thing muffling it was the mesh fences surrounding them, and the old gate they stood in front of, that lead to the basketball court.

The unnecessary pressure to say something punctuated the silence that much more. As unimportant as it seemed, Ivy felt the need to perform; to _be._ His silent envy of Waylon grew and morphed, shaping into an almost adolescent desire to impress. He wanted him to see that he "wasn't that way", though it mattered little in a space like this. "I… um."

Waylon stopped and turned on his heel, listening intently, mostly out of paranoia.

"No one's going to call me Ivy after this is over. My real name is…" He hadn't uttered it in such a long time. He did it to keep his privacy, to keep space between him and the other inmates. But now, as the sickly stench of death hung above him so prominently, he felt no space left. "Adrian."

The hostage furrowed his brow slightly, turning his head in confusion. Waylon didn't care. But he noted the man's clenched jaw and the way he balled the fabric of his jumpsuit in his fists out of habit. "Alright." He replied, turning back to face the gate. The handle was cold but Waylon opened it, taking only two steps into the basketball court before the wind was let from his lungs by a heavy, firm object to his chest. A human head lay decapitated at his feet, the lukewarm thickness of the blood pooling in the crevices of his toes. He doubled back, greeted by a pale man, and enough other inmates to fill out a small basketball team.

The head wasn't what got Adrian's attention. It was the man without one, stuffed into the basketball hoop. However the discovery of the head was a most unpleasant one. He recognized the pale man's voice, but his face was marred by lesions and scabs. He remembered him as a sickly man, always complaining about the weather; how it was never the right temperature for basketball. Whatever that meant. It felt like a trap. There were too many people, not enough exits. Adrian looked beyond the pale man and saw that Waylon was doing the same. They recognized the two brothers wielding machetes and made a conscious decision that this scenario didn't just feel like a trap, it _was_ one. Waylon ran on instinct, and Adrian shoved past the emaciated man, ducking under his arm and hurling himself onto the ladder nearby. Though he had recognized most of those men, he'd remembered they'd been over-medicated most every time he'd seen them prior. He knew what they'd do if they caught them. They both did.

At the top of the ladder, Waylon mumbled to himself about the radio again, twiddling his fingers carefully. It was small, but it was enough to make Adrian cock his head and squint. He felt strange about it; it gave him a sick feeling inside his stomach. He was reminded of his first exposure to the Engine, and how it made him throw up and blink too much. He remembered being nervous, scared on command. But he couldn't pin Waylon for a patient, not yet. There was far too much at stake. As they walked into the small guard tower, there was a stillness. "Are you alright?" He asked, as gently as he could.

Waylon took a deep breath and felt his legs give as he attempted to sit down. His head pounded and his heart jumped. The air felt humid and smelled like loose change, and it made his lungs hurt. "N…No." He stuttered.

"Oh, uh. Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." He said once more.

Adrian paused for a moment and rested against the wall. A noise came from his throat. "Where's the radio?"

"Not here." Waylon croaked, catching his breath. "It's above us, I think. I had to take a tour of the place for orientation. They wanted us to remember the exits."

The other man grinned a bit. "In case this sort of thing happened?"

"No, fire safety. They didn't want lawsuits."

"No shit, really? God, they're all so conceited, aren't they? Conducting illegal activity unsupervised and they don't think it can all go wrong at the flip of a switch. Why the fuck would you even want to work somewhere like this?"

"The pay." Waylon interjected swiftly.

"Fair."

Waylon stood up. He tensed his shoulders and brushed past Adrian. His skin had become pink and flushed again, his ears red and his eyes returned from their glossy state. They continued up towards the security station where the radio lay untouched.

From the top of the tower, Adrian could see the entirety of the asylum. The fog pooled below, but he made out the soft yellow lights in the front courtyard from where he stood. Above the chaos, the air was fresh. Cicadas sang in the trees and the breeze coming off the mountain was cold. He had a memory of an open window and orange sun blazing through the bars. He remembered sitting in a comfortable chair and watching the man across from him clumsily stitch two pieces of fabric together with a plastic sewing needle. He remembered smiling, and how warm the sun made it feel. Adrian recalled that he was given more liberties that week because he wasn't scheduled for therapy at the Engine until the upcoming Sunday, and he was off on good behavior. He was waiting to watch an old program on the television, and he felt like he wanted it to be this way forever. That was when it had happened. When he'd made the promise that brought him to where he was now.

"Hey," He whispered lowly, below the TV's droning noise. "You and I are going to escape one day."

The other man had exhaled through his nose and shook his head.

"I'm serious, this isn't like the other times."

"It's been a year, hasn't it? That you've been saying these things?"

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm kidding."

"Alright, fine. If you find the key, make sure you unlock us both, Darling." He said amusedly before returning to stitching, creating enormous holes in the fabric with the plastic needle.

Adrian stood in the dark and remembered where he was. The fog had rolled in and covered the mountains and everything else. How long had he been daydreaming?

" _Adrian_." A voice said, stern and tinged with impatience.

He turned on his heel and saw Waylon standing beside a heavy door, his arms lax and his knees locked. "Huh?"

"It's this way."

"Right."

The corridor to the station had been nothing new. There was little left to the imagination after the countless hours of unwilling subjection to gore and bloodshed. A man was left splattered against the wall while another was beaten senseless beyond the barrier of a door. As long as Waylon and Adrian were left unharmed, this was what they defined as peace. The constant shouting and raving screams faded into the background as Waylon became desensitized to what Adrian, what they _all,_ were numb to.

The interior of the radio tower lied beyond a heavy metal door at the end of the hallway. The men tracked blood through the darkened room on their feet. Waylon took the lead to enter the control room and call the police, pressing buttons and staring into the screens blankly.

Adrian stood in the darkness of the main room, counting the illuminated buttons strewn about the walls. It made him feel small and angry, seeing for himself the extensive technology and costly super computers that decorated the area. It made his mouth dry, knowing that he lived in the textbook definition of squalor, with improperly sorted inmates of varying degrees of crime while Murkoff made a pretty penny from it all and laughed. He hid himself in the darkness, the feeling of loss finally culminating, coming to a head after a painstaking three years in confinement.

Stop. Something moved.

Adrian turned slowly, crouching against the shadow of a large switchboard. He could peek inside the control room only enough to see a tidy black pant leg and a matching black dress shoe. His blood ran cold, quickly deducing that these did not belong to Waylon. Adrian sat on his knees, raising himself to look through the window into the control room. All at once, he saw a man set upon Waylon, striking him with his elbow only once before bashing the radio in on itself with a nightstick. He heard Waylon choke as he was beaten with the weapon and thrown to the ground. He had little room to intervene, as he was stuck with nothing but his bare hands. Adrian couldn't see the other man's face, but he sounded important. He was dressed like he worked here, and talked like he did, too. He held Waylon on the ground, the nightstick pressed firmly against his trachea. His intent to kill was obvious and fuelled by the sort of rage typical of a corporate asshole like him. It was nothing unexpected, but it was alarming nonetheless.

The man's grip on the nightstick faltered when the door in the main room began to shake and move away from its hinges. It came away from the frame and fell to the ground with a hard, metallic bang, revealing the inmate behind it. He stood at seven feet tall, dipping his head under the door frame just to fit. Adrian remembered the man, but not his name. He simply recalled being stuck in the same ward as him for a while before he escaped his cell and made quick work of two guards. Adrian committed to memory the relief he felt when they put the guy in isolation, and what the other inmates told him about how he'd apparently had an unusual obsession with three-eyed lizards and the way people looked when they were turned inside-out.

Adrian crawled into the control room, where Waylon lied still, heaving and catching his breath. He shook him hard, whispering loudly as he did. "Get up. _Get up,_ we have a problem. A big, big _fucking_ problem."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyyy I updated this! It took me a little while to figure out how far I wanted to jump ahead but I think this turned out alright. When I'd written it previously it was a lot of just essentially re-writing the game. Hopefully I can continue to update more frequently on this, I'd like for it to turn out nice.


	3. Regret

Adrian's muscles throbbed and his skin itched as he pulled Waylon half of the way up onto his rear. He pressed a finger to his own lips and shushed the man, who was plenty quiet as it was. He trembled as he crawled to the doorframe to peek out into the main room. The buttons and lights that flickered on the switchboards were blotted out into darkness as a colossal silhouette passed in front of them. The inmate breathed through his teeth, his lips shredded down to bone. Blood mixed past the enamel, making his exhalations wet and labored. He hunted in a pattern, passing from one end of the room to the other. He gazed into the grain of the door, studying it for faults in the integrity. _Wasn't he in the war before this?_

Adrian nudged Waylon's shoulder and decided in a split moment that they would make their move now. It was an unconscious decision, one that was based solely on the way his muscles yanked at him to be rid of his situation. Grabbing Waylon's arm, he clumsily drew him to his feet, starting into a dash out of the room. Maybe there was something his brain wasn't allowing him to remember, something he saw the inmate do that burned into the sinews of his muscles and drove him to tear down the corridor with unbridled desperation.  

The body aches that came with the sprint down the hallway made things twice as tricky. Adrian's legs felt like jelly and cinder blocks in equal parts, adrenaline pumping faster than what he had felt inside the Engine. He hadn't checked if Waylon was close behind until he was sure that he wasn't being followed anymore; his sense of self preservation carried dominion over everything else. There was something about seeing that inmate again. It made his heart drop into his gut. He remembered the other patients mumbling idle gossip in commissary the day he'd killed those guards. Things about what he'd done before he was committed, how he was in another facility in Texas and did the same thing to a handful of inmates. How _it was bound to happen eventually,_ and _we're just lucky it was them, not us._ There was also the bewilderment as to why he wasn't sent to the isolation ward immediately following commitment. But that was something else entirely.

The door slammed behind him and he jumped. He turned around to find Waylon scrambling with a flimsy chain lock, his bruised hands trembling as he tried to fit the mechanism together. How silly, Adrian thought, what someone will do just to feel safe. He didn't hear the heavy boots on the floor outside, or the bloodied, wet breathing coming from behind the door. "He's not coming." He said between attempts to catch his breath. "You can stop fooling with that. What's it even going to do, anyway?"

"I don't know! I-I.. I don't know what's going on!" Waylon shouted, frustrated. His palms flattened against the door and he stood still, touching the wood to stable himself. "That coward, Blaire! He… He just smashed the God damn radio!"

"That guy in the suit? How do _you_ know him?"

Waylon breathed shallowly, sweat upon his brow and his head full of pressure. So much pressure, like he would pop if there was any more. He was so angry, angrier than he'd ever remembered being before. He wondered if it was what the Engine wanted. "He's the head of Project Walrider. He's my supervisor."

"God. Then what're you doing in that jumpsuit? Shouldn't you be in a shiny elevator on your way up and out of here?"

"No, no." He shook his head, his blonde hair sticking to his face and into his eyes. He turned and pushed his back against the door, sliding down to sit on the tiled floor. His legs gave way and he landed abruptly on his ass. His hand wiped the sweat from his face and he rested his arms against his knees. "No, Blaire had me committed. He found me in the storage room trying to send a stupid e-mail."

"Couldn't have been too stupid if Murkoff didn't like it."

Waylon didn't want to say any more. He found himself in the middle, holding onto both justice and blissful ignorance, and his grip was slipping on the latter. He wished he could be done with his contract, on his way home to complain to Lisa about Blaire's stupid voice and the way his stupid face looked when he talked down to him. He wanted to talk to his boys about school and sports and dinner and… he wished he hadn't done the right thing. He wished so strongly that he'd been like his coworkers: Selfish and wrong. He breathed deeply and put the tears brimming at his eyes away. It wasn't over yet. Not yet.

"Eddie." Adrian said under his breath, like maybe if he said it quietly he wouldn't have to continue.

"Huh?"

"The guy I'm after is named Eddie. He was locked up a year after I was. They sorted us wrong and we both ended up in Cell Block C for a while." He remembered it vividly. He'd come back to his cell with an enormous headache and hadn't eaten anything all day. They'd kept him under too long; the Engine had taken a toll on him. The top of his head tingled and the holes in his skin right above his collarbone throbbed. They had fit the tubes there, stretching him every which way to get a result. He felt like what he was: a number. It had been dark but the lights were still on. He remembered sitting on the lumpy mattress and hanging his head. He remembered how dejected he'd felt. The cell door beside his had creaked and moaned as it opened, and he had found it odd, because no one had been assigned there before. He'd looked up and seen a tall man with a muddled undercut struggling against three or four guards, two of which were armed. Adrian had backed into the corner of his mattress, keeping his distance in the event that something went wrong.

"You can't prove anything!" The man had shouted. "I swear to God, those photos mean nothing! _Nothing!_ You fucks! Come back here!"

Adrian heard the man moving erratically in his cell. He peeked through a sizable hole in the concrete that separated the units. He watched the man clasp his hands about the cell bars and shake the door violently.

The lights dimmed. It must have been 10 PM. He couldn't ever forget the man's face catching the light left between the cells, the way it looked like an animal's face. He was that way for a while, shaking the bars and hollering into the prison block. Adrian's head pulsed and his heart had slowed, the sound becoming more of a nuisance now than anything else. "Hey, they aren't going to let you go, man. Can you cut that shit out?" He said in-between the man's yelling.

"What?" He replied, viciously turning his head to peer into the hole in the wall. "Who are you? What do you know?"

"I've been here for a year and a half already. This place isn't like other prisons. They put you into a machine and poke you full of tubes and fluids, so if you don't shut your mouth they're going to make sure _you're_ first in line."

The man fell to his knees and reluctantly gazed into the other cell. Adrian saw his eye through the hole, piercing and bloodshot. "What did you say?" He had asked, his tone changing and his breath catching in his throat.

"I said you're going in the machine. Whether you like it or not."

"Is… is that what happened to you?"

Adrian sighed heavily, holding his aching head in his hands. The nanites crawled through his veins, his blood thick with them by now. How he'd avoided the majority of the lesions was beyond him. But the scars were strange and warped his skin. He was always sure the tubes would fit just right; it wouldn't hurt to insert them anymore. He was always wrong. "Yeah." He mumbled. "It's what happens to you here. They'll start you off by making you watch a tape for a few hundred hours. Then they put you inside."

"I never… that's illegal!"

"Uh-huh. Isn't what you did illegal, too?"

"I didn't do anything! Did they show you? Its… falsified evidence, those photos."

"Listen, I don't care what you did. If they say it happened, then that's that. If you actually did it is something different, and I don't want to know. What do you think someone like me is going to do if you tell me you did whatever it is you did? Who is there to tell?" His heart pounded. He heard the uneven rhythm in his head. A drum pulsing against the dim lights and the silent prison block. "You're about to rot in hell. The least you can do is stop all that shouting so I can get some sleep."

It was a memory that tasted sweet on his soured tongue. In the complete darkness of the rundown storage room he sat in now, he thought of it with fondness. He focused his gaze to where Waylon sat against the door, drinking in the silence like liquid gold. The whir of machinery was welcome to his ears in contrast to the screams of maltreated patients and mutilated doctors. "I didn't know what he'd done at the time. I just started to like talking to someone other than the therapist."

Waylon listened, though he'd much rather be on his way to an emergency exit. They were all probably boarded up, anyway. "I think we should get out of here."

Adrian nodded, helping Waylon to his feet and continuing down the hallway. The stench of blood had returned, permeating more than the air. It felt weighty, sticking to hair and skin. The warmth of bodies and anxiety left a nauseating humidity hanging throughout the majority of the building. The evacuation alarm blared overhead, urging personnel to head to the Administrative Block. In the time he spent as an inmate, Adrian couldn't recall passing through this hallway. This was somewhere for guards to slink unseen between prison blocks; it was somewhere that used to be clean and un-smeared with the red blood that now followed the asylum walls like a decoration. There was so much reason to resent Murkoff before, but now it was poignant and precise in Adrian's mind. The spotless hallways between blocks, the seemingly endless array of monitors and circuit boards that went past what lied beneath the facility, denial of medications, intentional worsening of psychiatric conditions. There was purpose in Waylon's venture: saving himself. Someone had to know. "What's your plan?" He asked, the blood on the floor pooling at the ball of his foot.

"Administration Block. Maybe there'll be a way out. And if your friend is smart, that's where he's going, too."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> boutta add "slow burn" onto this though i'm not intending on adding heaps upon heaps of relationship stuff... next up is the drying grounds and then we get into the thick of it >:)


	4. Fall

The fog was thick and gray, appearing almost viscous. Waylon's camera teetered on its last battery. It beeped, _beep, beep,_ lonely and desperate into the foul smelling darkness. An electric fence crackled and pulsed white in the distance, leading them forward with a primal urge, _follow the light._ The safety it promised left much to be desired. As it glowed on again and off again like a dim strobe against their faces, Adrian glanced to the left to look at Waylon. This courtyard wasn't somewhere he remembered well. He could have been moved from prison block to prison block through here once, but the overwhelming musk of death and burnt hair numbed his senses. "Do you know where we are?" He asked.

"No. This isn't familiar to me." Waylon said lowly. Though he was coming to the conclusion that the inmate didn't mean him _immediate_ harm, it was difficult to read his eyes. He was wrung dry by tests and maltreatment. He'd seen what the patients did when they snapped, when synapses fired too quickly or not at all. The way Murkoff treated these men made the majority of them terribly volatile on a dime. He wasn't entirely convinced Adrian was who he said he was. Things were off; they always were. Or maybe it was just his imagination. "But…" Waylon shifted his gaze past the electric fence, in between the mesh. "I remember that."

The building stood taller than most of the rest, casting a broad blackened shadow into the sky. The moon shrunk as it collided with it, a sliver of its light disappearing behind the pointed head of the roof.

"What is it?" Adrian wondered. He hadn't been there, either.

"It's like what we've seen before. It's a tower. If we get up there, maybe we can get our bearings." Waylon furrowed his brow. He'd only remembered it because he'd gotten gum on his shoe as he'd walked past it. Hell, he didn't even know why he remembered _that._ Maybe it was God, maybe it was the Engine. But regardless of how far he ran in the other direction, it was substantial proof in his mind that he was always being lead to this moment. His stomach dropped to his knees. What if he isn't _supposed_ to get out?

"Alright." Adrian said, confusion on his lips. "What are we supposed to do about the fence?"

"Well, we turn it off." Waylon stated matter-of-factly. His eyes darted around the courtyard and locked onto a chain link fence, illuminated by a small LED wall light. The gate was lying on the floor, and darkness rested beyond the entrance. "In there. We have to start somewhere, and I need more batteries anyways. There might be some that way."

The room they descended into certainly seemed correct. But the stench of death was stronger here, more sticky. It clung to each hair in the nose, every taste bud on the tongue. Wooden pallets and blue liquid drums were scattered through the room. There was extra fencing, a bulk stash of aluminum buckets, and metal lockers that lined the walls in neat succession on either side. It wasn't hard to deduce that this was a storage room. Waylon broke open the back of a radio and stuck one of the two AA batteries into his camera. He watched Adrian round the corner and disappear behind the row of lockers, and he took a brief moment to catch his breath.

He'd heard the inmate before Waylon had. He had to check. Every last patient, every single person he'd crossed paths with, he'd looked into their eyes. Dead or alive, eyes couldn't lie. Adrian felt the itch crawl up his back, like a tick latching into his skin. He needed to see for himself if it was _him._ Light poured through a padlocked gate to his right. This was where the smell reached its limit. It watered Adrian's eyes and soured his tongue, the sweetness coming first, then the stench of spoiled fat, and finally the dulled odor of liquids, all bodily, that ran a red-orange streak from under the gate and through the corridor. Adrian stood in front of the gate, stink permeating his jumpsuit. His lips parted and he took a breath. It wasn't Eddie. It was something else.

A short, gangly man in a tattered prison uniform, his back to the entrance and his feet hidden underneath the mass of scattered organs and corpses. He was unaware of the audience as his head fell back and his eyes rolled in their sockets. He stood in the center of the pile, ephemeral bliss dripping from his voice and his hands. It seemed he experienced something he'd waited for; something he'd fantasized about but never acted upon.

Adrian could hear his head, like a mechanism, ticking to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Then, it stopped. This was the Engine's work, too. He watched closely, though his decency advised against it. Gazing into the depravity through the mesh gate made him fall deeper, he knew it. But something pulled him inwards, closer to the entryway, to hear the man's softened, lilted moans _just_ that much better. Or to smell the hot, putrid, liquid sex that permeated beyond the bars. The nanites pulsed inside his blood, the Walrider stirred. For a fourth time his feet buried themselves under running blood and this time he felt it soak into his skin. His hands steadied themselves at his sides. It was at this moment, he realized he was trembling. From what, he was unclear. It had been so very long since he'd felt this way. The hum of electricity was all around him, in his ears, a constant drumming into his brain. It was chanting, _fall, fall, fall._

"What the fuck are you doing?"

Adrian's heart leapt. The noise made him jump, and made the chant silence itself. He went cold and clenched his fists. The room was still, maybe more than it was before. What just happened? Was he that far gone? He stuttered out an answer, but Waylon didn't hear him.

"I turned the fence off. Did you not hear me go by?" Waylon glanced inside the gate, scrunching his face in disgust and covering his nose with the collar of his jumpsuit. He looked into Adrian's eyes, but didn't say anything. Perhaps because he didn't need to, or maybe because he was afraid. The two tended to amalgamate in this place. "Come on."

The night air blew against Adrian's face as he and Waylon exited the breaker room. The courtyard was still, darkened by the absence of the pulsing electric current. The cold September air jolted him, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him hard. He hadn't escaped it. He had to face himself and admit the truth: that Murkoff had wormed its way into him, slicked its hands and played with his insides. His head felt like a steel ball, weighty and pressurized. He didn't look at Waylon; he couldn't. He couldn't, because he knew he would have that look on his face. The one that reminded him of his abnormality, and of the situation he was in that he'd taken so many precautions to avoid.

The climb up the tower was hushed, save for the wet, metallic footsteps they took up each stair. Something had happened in there. Waylon had seen it: Adrian's eyes, brown then blackened by a primal impulse. By the same thing all the patients succumbed to. It was the overwhelming boil in the blood, the lick of the lips, the ravenous hunger that overtook each man in this place one by one. He'd reminded Waylon of Manera, the same starved desire in his eyes as he pleaded with himself to not gnash his teeth and _at least_ stay a distance from the gate. It frightened Waylon, to see what could become of even the once-sane under such prolonged conditions. _It could be me,_ he thought, _it can't be me._ Metal groaned, chains clinked, and they walked up the winding stairway, both heavy with the cumbersome weight of burden. There was nothing to say when they reached the top. No relief, no confidence, and still no sense of direction. The air was light at the tallest point of the tower, and it whistled in their ears, mixing with the ever-present shriek of what lied in the core of the Engine. A dense fog pooled over everything, the only thing visible being Mount Massive, tall and ominous, illuminated by the moon in the distance.

Adrian felt his head spin. Maybe he was too high up, or maybe he was still reeling. He could see remnants of static inkblots in his peripheral vision. The Thing ached so profusely to worm its way inside. He knew now that if he'd gone under one last time, he wouldn't have ever come out. He could have ended up like Billy: trapped in the pod, forever a slave to the hypnotic droning of the monitor. "Do you see anything?" He croaked, hoarse from the cold.

Waylon shook his head. Everything was painted different shades of black, layered beneath a waning moon. He couldn't define one building from the next, let alone identify which one could be the Administration Block. He felt his gut wrench; this had been nothing short of a bad idea. A man had jumped from the top of this tower a while ago, when he'd barely begun his contract here. He recalled how uneasy he'd felt when nothing seemed to change afterwards. Perhaps _this_ was why he'd remembered the tower. That thought set his mind to ease, at least.

They held onto the railing as the metal groaned beneath their feet. The balcony wrapped around the tower like a snake, and Waylon had suggested that the view around the back would be better, _it had to be._ He clung to his desperation for as long as he was allowed, but he felt it slip from his grasp when the metal became jagged. The snake had split, the balcony broken and dilapidated, a piece of it missing from where it belonged. The tower screeched underneath their weight, giving way to a thirty foot drop.

It was black only but a second. Adrian awoke to a sharp pain in his fingers. He'd fallen, _hadn't he?_ Shouldn't he be dead? Waylon. Where was he? A whine left his throat as he pulled himself from his position on the ground. He spit dirt from his mouth and licked his teeth. He moved to speak but coughed instead, tasting blood and finding that he had bitten his tongue.

Waylon sat against a wooden shelf, clutching at his rib cage. Something must be broken, there was no way he was okay. He had landed on Adrian's arm, he found that out when he'd rolled off of it. Where was this place? How in God's name was he going to get out of this mess? "Adrian?" He called to the man stiffly crawling towards the sound of his voice. "You alright?"

"What the fuck happened?" He coughed out, still winded from the fall.

"I don't know. It shouldn't have…" Waylon breathed in deeply, feeling the throbbing of his ribs as his lungs pressed into them. "…collapsed like that."

"My… my fingers are broken. I don't know how I'm alive but my fingers are broken."

"All of them?"

"No." He said. "Only these, I think." He referred to the second and third fingers on his left hand. "I-I don't know what to do." He stuttered. He looked like a child, swallowing pathetic tears as his hands trembled.

Waylon thought of his boys, though Adrian was only about ten years younger than he was. "Well stop trying to move it around. Let me… uh." He searched around the area with his eyes, taking care not to twist too much. He choked out a pained grunt as he reached across from the other man to grasp a thin piece of boarding that lied on the floor. "I think I can put it in a splint. I was hiking with my family once, and my son broke his finger. We weren't anywhere near a hospital, so I had to do it myself for the time being." He explained, ripping loose pieces from the ragged edges of his pant legs. "Hey, you probably didn't even break them. Only a sprain, you know?" Waylon said, his heart still human enough to tie a strong knot around the wood and muster a small smile.

Adrian's fingers rested flat in the splint. He hoped by some miracle, Waylon was right. He pulled himself to his feet, hoisting the other man up as well. He didn't know where they were anymore. _How much of this place was there?_ It had seemed so small from where he'd stood in his cell. The dark enveloped them, save for the bulb that burned above them. In the distance, he could hear something- a voice. They weren't safe; they never were.

_"Don't need any sisters. Maybe some… some girls that ain't blood."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate title: I don't believe that most people would get out of a 30 ft drop with just minor injuries but how else are we supposed to run for our lives?  
> Also Weird Masturbating Guy in Storage Room always freaked me out so he's here too lol  
> Next chapter gets wild, maybe


End file.
